


Twitch

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Faustian Bargain, Gore, M/M, Recreational Doctor Faustus references, The dreadful second person point of view, What amounts to necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 03:13:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9415628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Some like it hot.  Some like it cold.  Some like it both ways.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While this story isn't, by my standards, excessively bloody or disturbing, if the idea of a- tastefully rendered, if I may say so- threeway between a demon, a living human, and a decapitated walking corpse, with all that this may imply, puts you off, please don't read this.  
> I am not involved in the production of Sleepy Hollow, and this school is not involved in the production of Sleepy Hollow. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

All men are the same, though they think they aren't. This is, you suppose, what makes them men. The illusion of singularity, significance. What they say is true: man was made in God's image. But just the image The substance is sorely lacking.  
He thought himself very clever, asking for immortality. You smiled. You would have, even if this hadn't tickled you. “But you have immortality,” you told him, “That's precisely what you mean to trade away.”  
For a moment, this puzzled him. “Oh,” he then said, drawing it out comically. “You mean my soul. No, no, no- I'm talking about real immortality. I want to live forever in this body. This young body,” he added, smiling slyly. “I don't want to end up like that fellow in Greek mythology, transformed into a cicada.”  
“But you also want treasure, fame, glory- surely, you realize that these don't last forever.”  
Looking amused, he narrowed his eyes. “You're not trying to talk me out of this, are you? Because I assure you, I'm set upon it.”  
“I simply mean to ensure your satisfaction. The bargain is quite binding. There's no reason to attempt to cheat you or trick you. For your protection, it's necessary that you understand the implications of what you desire.”  
“Your customer service is excellent.”  
“We aim to please.”  
He smiled at you, with the slightly pitying expression you'd come to learn is simply the set of his features. In the candlelight, his eyes glittered. “All right,” he said, “How long am I going to live?”  
“Assuming you weren't to meet with an accident, or foul play? Sixty-five years.”  
“Sixty-five,” he said, the light fading in his eyes, “Forty years. It's a good, round number, at least. Faustus only got twenty-seven. Was he a real person?” He held up his hand, smiled. “Don't answer that. It's more fun not knowing where the story ends and reality begins.”  
You discussed terms. After the initial foolishness, he was practical, efficiently agreeable. “But the deal-breaker,” he said, “is you.”  
“What about me?”  
“Faustus had his Mephistopheles,” he poked a finger into your sternum, as if to vouchsafe that this body was solid, “so, I must have mine. I want you to work for me.”  
“Yes.”  
“Obey me in all things.”  
“Yes.”  
“You'll stay with me- live with me- so that you'll be available to serve me at any hour of the day or night.”  
“Yes.”  
“Anything I want?” He frowned a little. He hadn't meant to make it a question. Nor to sound so hopeful.  
“Yes.” Suddenly, you felt like being indulgent.  
“If I wanted to...” he shook his head slightly, thinking, “throw you off of a fifty-storey building.”  
“Then you should do so.”  
“If I wanted you to wash my car.”  
“I would do it.”  
“You're kind of a long-suffering fellow, aren't you?”  
“I don't suffer.”  
“Not even in hell?”  
“Shall I say 'Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it'?”  
He laughed giddily.  
He couldn't bear to cut his own wrist. You told him that it must be of his own volition that his blood spilled, and that he must be given, unaided, to sign his name. You asked to examine the blade. When you gave it back, it was so sharp that it parted his skin like air. Only when it was over, did he feel anything. He bade you bandage the wound, and you did. He asked for a drink. You gave him one. He questioned you on matters of science, both earthly and divine. You conversed with him long into the night.  
He wanted to go to bed. You went with him to his chamber. He asked if he was the first. You told him that demons are notorious liars. This pleased him. You burned him with your touch. This pleased him, too. The skin blistered. The blisters sank back into flesh, smoothed into scar; you watched the scars fade, in seconds.  
All except one, on the back of his thigh. He'll never see it. But you know that it's there.

*

You're jealous. It's what he wants. If he thought that your promise to obey him in all things was a hollow one, he didn't understand what he was asking. You know his heart. Its hunger, endless and dumb, like the travels of a sleepwalker. He parades men in front of you. He speaks softly to them, laughs at their wit, bats his eyelashes, promises them fine things. It's pure mummery. He doesn't touch any of them. It seems to be the knowledge that he could that he enjoys. He enjoys hurting you. You let him. You're his servant.  
Somehow, though, the masque becomes real. It shouldn't surprise you. The world was made with a word. We are our functions in life, whether or not we wish it to be so. You're his servant. Thus, you serve.  
It's his obsessions that he serves. They grow into schemes, which he tends furiously. You're his diary as much as his confidant: he asks you to repeat back to him the little details he threw off in an idle moment, or as he lay in bed trying to both sleep and remain awake, which in the moment glowed so brightly in his brain, but scatter in time like embers on a hearth rug. You keep meticulous track of his desires, and the desires of his desires; the fractals that spiral from him. Visions spanning thousands of years into the future. If you didn't know better, you'd think that he was looking for a way out.  
The man- Ichabod Crane- is a trifle. All men are the same. Flesh and bone stuffed with a soul, existing in time and space, merely. This one's had slightly more time than they usually do, but the clock began to run again as soon as he awoke. His body's still rotting. You smell it when he's finally in the same room as you. You smell sweat, skin, corruption, the processes of the flesh. It's charming, in its way, but it's common. They may excite each other, but not you. He'd be interesting to take apart, but the pleasure would last a moment. It's fitting that his name means “no glory”. In this, he is utterly a man.  
If while Crane is there in his office, Malcolm fizzes and sparks and preens like a cat at the sound of his own voice, slinky with pleasure, it's because he's charmed by his own art. He's charmed by Crane's fame, too. He's always been a whore for a well-known name. It was, after all, why he had to have you.  
And if you find yourself sulking, on the way down to the basement to retrieve the prop in Malcolm's pantomime, it's merely because you're a good actor. Acting's not so different from lying.  
The other, however- you can't really call him a man, though this is what he once was- concerns you. Like all men, Malcolm has no perspective. Everything's new to him. You see him standing before the mirrors of his bathroom and his closet each morning. You watch him move, looking at his body from different angles, slumping, then straightening, then slumping again. He tests the skin of his brow, his throat. He examines the recession of his hairline, pokes at the pale pink skin that shows in patches through brown velvet. Time's supposed to confer wisdom. Paradoxically, wisdom can only be accrued at a leisurely pace, when time seems infinite. Malcolm knows exactly how much time he has left. He's been to doctors, looking not for salvation but for doom; the author of his demise. His heart is weak, and his blood is like syrup. His lungs are threadbare. Childhood bronchitis brought pneumonia to the adult. You're nervous.  
“This isn't a good idea,” you say. It's not the first time. You've been warning Malcolm steadily, since he first started talking about the Horseman. Saying it again, now, is pointless. You wonder why you do.  
“Nonsense,” Malcolm says brightly. When he's this jolly, it means that he's not going to entertain objections.  
“I'd offer you a drink, but of course,” Malcolm smiles, “You don't drink.”  
You know that he once did. Once, he drank water, and beer- wine, whiskey, milk, tea. You know that he liked weak, cool tea on a hot day. You know that he only ever drank rum when he was poorly. Rum in hot milk, a scarf wrapped around his neck. The juice of the blackberry ran down his throat in August. A thorn went through the pad of his thumb, and he stuck it in his mouth. Blood of the vine, and of man.  
His shoulders fall in irritation.  
You want to say that this is in bad taste, that it could offend your guest and make him do something violent. You don't, though. You almost want it to happen. Malcolm's never learned not to push his luck. He needs to learn. He doesn't have that much time left in which to learn.  
“Jobe,” Malcolm scolds, “where are your manners? Take the man's coat.”  
He suffers you to remove his coat. He's tired, all of the time. There's no rest for the wicked. He's old, but he's still young, the way that all men are, even the dead. Only someone young could be this weary. At some point on the journey to Malcolm's home, he figured out what was going on. Nothing truly changes. Especially not this. You watch him grab Malcolm. Malcolm's gasp is neither spontaneous nor rehearsed. The air's compressed from his body as a matter of fact. You feel more than hear the crackle in his lungs. Malcolm knows that, with you, he's safe, so he laughs; rich, bubbling, braying. He has his hands on the man's shoulders, his arms. You feel them as though they were on you.  
You hold Malcolm from behind, like you do as he sleeps. His backside rubs against you as he rises up on his toes. You watch him touch his mouth to dead meat. The tip of his tongue darts out over the prickling pale red marrow, traces the line of hewn vertebra, like a crown of bone in grayish muscle. You feel him tremble, from the tension in his legs. From something else. This is when you realize that you love him. Whether it's a vestigial tickle of your origins- loving the image- blood from a very old wound- or some mutation of office, you cannot say. He's dying all around you, his body failing more by the second. That morning, his chest pumped out brownish jelly on a tide of squawking cough. One of his teeth is dying at the root, and will have to be pulled. He talks in his sleep. He bites his fingernails. He's small and grotesque and unimportant, but as you watch him wallow in animated offal, you know that there will never be another living creature like him.  
You're so glad that he decided to damn himself. You'll never have to worry about missing him.  
You take off Malcolm's clothes. You let the Horseman look at him for long time, with his eyeless sight. Without being asked, you get down on your knees.  
The Horseman hasn't touched living flesh in centuries. It all but burns him, his frigid frame. They're all feverish, now. Malcolm shakes from heat and chill. You know that his bones ache; his lungs and nasal passages feel scoured. You have him from behind while the Horseman has him from the front. It's like ice dissolving in hot water. In the kingdom of hell, there are such places- adamant glaciers pirouetting in seas of molten brine. There are palaces constructed of the bodies of dead men, perspiring red walls; courtyards dewed in gore. There are gardens filled with briers that balm the wounds they make. To prick oneself is to fall into a labyrinth of agony and ecstasy, both.  
To be damned is to be in hell at all times. Malcolm has yet to learn this, but the time is coming when the knowledge will be unavoidable. And then, when this happens, you will have both come home.


End file.
